This hefty, gift-worthy collection has all the hallmarks of a writer’s resurrection from near senescence. And then you turn the first page and find Michaels’ voice inside, hurrahing out from beyond the grave at full tilt, winging naughty sentences at the sky. “In the spring of the year following his divorce,” starts off “Girl with a Monkey,” while traveling alone in Germany, “Beard fell in love with a young prostitute named Inger and canceled his plans for further travel.”
Like his better-known contemporary Philip Roth, Michaels blasted into this world on a current of late-1960s sexuality. And yet, minus their sexual politics, the 38 stories in this book, which date back to the 1960s, feel as if they could have been written yesterday. The incidents they describe could have occurred an hour ago. The rhythm and pitch of their sentences is so perfectly balanced one has to work at not continuing through the whole book. “She didn’t like me,” starts one story, “so I called her every day.”
Miscommunications, misinterpretations and hilarious crossings of paths surface again and again in this work—often presented through an expertly crafted montage of dialogue. Only the late Richard Yates seemed to understand as well as Michaels how effectively men and women talk over and around each other. Hopefully, as with Yates’ collected stories, this book will bring Michaels’ dark vision to a whole new generation of readers.
It won’t be for lack of material. This book contains all of Michaels’ early short fiction, as well as a selection from his work in the ’90s, and then ends with seven never-before-collected stories concerning a Jewish mathematician, Nachman, which is his most emotionally engaging work. The jiggle and wiggle of his early fiction, which unfurls so swiftly on the page in those short sentences, takes on a guarded darkness, a fitting end note to a career fitfully coming back into the limelight.
The Collected Stories
Leonard Michaels
*****
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26